President Trump smiles as he speaks in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 31. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

(Newser)
–
The latest fight between the media and the president is about a bathrobe. On Monday, the New York Times ran a front-page article about life in the White House that included a personal detail about President Trump: It says he sometimes watches cable news at night in his bathrobe. White House spokesman Sean Spicer lit into the article in general as "riddled with inaccuracies" and called out that detail in particular. "I don't think the president wears a bathrobe, and definitely doesn't own one," he said, per CNN. Almost immediately, old photos began appearing on Twitter of Trump in a bathrobe. As a Mashable puts it, a quick online search yields images of a "bonafide bathrobe superfan," and it notes that Trump even donated an autographed one to charity in 2016.

One of the reporters of the story, Maggie Haberman, defended the piece on CNN as an attempt to provide a more human look at Trump and the White House, reports the Week. "There's plenty of presidents who have worn bathrobes," she said, adding that the "guarded" Trump "doesn't always want to be humanized." She called the story "endearing," but the president clearly disagreed. One tweet accused the newspaper of "writing total fiction" about him and, a later one, after the CNN interview aired, complained: "The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!" Spicer said the paper owed the president an apology over the "fake news."

Dear press, the US public is not interested in crowd sizes and bathrobes and POTUS is not interested in facts, as he creates and lives in his own reality. You have to rethink the way you are going to cover this presidency, because the public (your client) is already fed up with the bickering and the tweets about non-issues. You're role is to hold the government accountable for deliverables that matter. Lets start with an example, the wall. I think the US is best served with a cost effective protection from its borders, so lets see what the wall is going to cost (both to build and to maintain and operate), when will it be operational, how many illegals will it stop from entering the country and by how much will crime statistics be reduced. We then need to see if this the most effective way to reduce crime and monitor the project against promises. Ask some universities how they would monitor the cost, time and deliverables of such a program, by defining the metrics and the source of data and select one or more to operationalize the monitoring program. The press can then cover the project on progress vs plan. The same can be done for education, the US debt position, health care, unemployment and all the other issues that matter. This style of reporting would help to make America honest again, which I think is a prerequisite to re-creating an environment where the shortcomings of society can be analysed, debated and addressed in a civilized and constructive manner.

SamSungSillySong

Feb 8, 2017 2:04 AM CST

This is deliberately done to entertain you with some chuckles from a clown admin. More to come. Stay tuned.